


Inferno

by hexicity



Series: seven masks [1]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Burns, Elemental Superpowers, Family Dynamic, Fire, Gen, superhero au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-01
Updated: 2017-10-01
Packaged: 2019-01-07 10:32:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12231087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hexicity/pseuds/hexicity
Summary: Despite how easy Peter Parker made it look, escaping from high school to perform daily superhero activities is not easy. There’s a million roadblocks already, and them trying to pull on skin-tight suits in Simon’s van would only add another struggle.





	Inferno

Jace is halfway through his statistics quiz when his phone buzzes. He wishes that for once, God, the city of New York could survive without his help. 

Mr. Eichner is at the front of the room. Jace sits near the back, but he’s unfortunately directly in the middle row. If he gets caught with his phone out during a quiz, he’ll get an automatic zero. That’s exactly the opposite of what his grade needs right now.

People could be dying, Jace, says the voice in his head that sounds a lot like Luke. Someone gets up to ask Eichner a question, and Jace pulls out his phone so fast that it nearly slips out of his now sweaty palms. 

There’s a growing list of notifications on his screen that he swipes through quickly to read the first. 

10:36 AM: BREAKING: RAGING INFERNO AT HISTORIC PATEL INN

He internally winces. It’s always a fire at the most inopportune times. It’s never a fire when he needs it to be, like when he’s about to present his English reports or when he’s about to run the mile in track. He scrolls up to read the group chat’s string of urgent, typo-ridden messages. After the first two, both sent by Alec, Jace realizes that he’s inescapably tied in to this. 

With a heavy sigh, Jace rubs his hands together under the desk. Bracing himself, he presses his left hand lightly against his forehead and tries not to wince at the discomfort. He quickly checks his appearance through his phone camera to confirm that he looks passably terrible, and then he stumbles to the front of the class. 

“Mr. Eichner,” He packs as much misery into his voice as possible, “I don’t feel so good. I--I kinda feel like I’m gonna pass out.”

His teacher takes one cursory glance at him, flushed cheeks and sweat forming at his temples, and nods. He scrawls a nurses pass in record time and gestures towards the door. “You’ll finish your quiz when you get back. Do you need someone to walk with you?”

Jace shakes his head immediately. “I’ll be fine.”

“If you pass out--”

“I’ll stay close to the wall.” Jace promises, and Eichner doesn’t even have time to point out how unhelpful that assurance is before Jace is bolting out the door. He all but sprints to the locker room and escapes through the only exit in the school that isn’t within view of any teachers. 

Simon and Clary are both waiting at the car. Clary’s cheeks are redder than Jace’s, two deep bursts of heat that drown out her freckles. She’s leaning against the hood and fanning herself with a plastic folder from her bag while Simon refills a crinkled water bottle and hands it over. 

“Took you long enough.” Simon tuts as Jace approaches, already yanking open the driver’s side door. “Come on, Jace, I can’t even use the fever thing and I got out faster.”

“I have no idea what you use to get out. I tried to be fast.” Jace groans as he climbs into the passenger seat. “At least I didn’t almost give myself a heat stroke.”

“I can’t help it.” Clary grumbles. “I either go too hot or lukewarm. I had to convince my forensics teacher not to call an ambulance.”

“I thought Jocelyn was helping you control it?” Simon asks. Jace grips at the safety handle on the ceiling as Simon floors it out of the parking lot and easily begins weaving through traffic at high speeds. He will always be amazed at Simon’s ability to reach their destination within minutes and remain an entirely casual conversation while doing so. 

“Yeah I mean,” Clary gives a muffled response as she struggles to pull her black dress on in the backseat, “I haven’t started a fire in a while. So that’s progress, right? Jace, hand me my mask.”

Jace reaches into the glove box and locates the red mask (her’s is a lighter rose while his is a dark burgundy) and passes it back. He yanks off his own shirt and pulls on the black tank from his gym bag, pulling up the hood and securing his own mask. Magnus’ insistence on them not wearing cliche superhero spandex had disappointed Simon and Clary at first, but Jace is infinitely grateful. Despite how easy Peter Parker made it look, escaping from high school to perform daily superhero activities is not easy. There’s a million roadblocks already, and them trying to pull on skin-tight suits in Simon’s van would only add another struggle. 

Changing into a hooded tank top with a little fire emblem stitched onto the chest is easy. Maybe the only easy thing about any of it. 

“Simon, you need to get changed.” Clary says anxiously from the backseat. “If someone took a picture of us right now, they’d see Simon Lewis driving around two of the Super Seven.”

“Did we agree on Super Seven?” Jace asks.

“Why would someone take a picture of us right now?” Simon asks incredulously. “And I can’t get changed when I’m driving, Fray.”

“Here,” Jace reaches over, “I’ll hold the wheel.”

“Get your fucking hands off my wheel, I swear to god.” 

“I’m helping you! Now stop distracting me, I’m driving.”

“Oh my God.”

So there’s a few things they need to work on. Jace wonders how Luke and Jocelyn managed this, when it was just the two of them against the world. If they could somehow do it all with seven elemental powers divided between both of them, why can’t Jace and the rest of his friends manage to drive to the crisis without nearly crashing the car? 

“Oh, shit.” Clary breathes. As the van makes a sharp turn into a new block, the hints of the burning building in the center of the twisting streets become impossible to miss. The smoke is heavy in the air and New Yorkers are making a mass exit, a crowd of people caught between escaping the fumes and glancing over their shoulder at the disaster. Simon makes a messy parallel parking job and hurriedly yanks on his hoodie and mask before they simultaneously scramble from the car. 

“Did you remember the ear piece this time?” Clary mutters to Jace as they jog through the crowd of panicked civilians. Jace rolls his eyes and tucks a lock of blonde behind his ear so she can see that the uncomfortable black piece is securely in place. She nods, satisfied. “Let’s do this.” 

“Hey,” Simon gently tugs at their sleeves, already separating from them in the crowd, “be safe, okay?”

“You too.” They say at the same time, and then Simon is gone. Jace and Clary don’t comment on their shared feeling of unease, because that won’t help anything. But it’s there, in both of them. The feeling of sudden regret for not saying more, for not making their parting words encapsulate everything that they want to say to Simon just in case it’s the last chance they get. 

“Hey.” Clary nudges him with her elbow at the base of the fire escape. “He’s not the one running into the burning building.”

“Fire forever, right?” He knocks his fist against hers, a gesture that would leave any other person on the planet with a severe burn. 

“Fire forever.” She laughs. 

Jace can’t be near Alec when he’s angry. It’s one of the hardest things about the entire process, because seeing his brother upset and not being able to contribute at all in calming him down is almost physically painful. He tried before, when Alec and Magnus had a short, stress-induced fight, to not let the elemental clashing of fire and ice get in the way of the bond between brother and brother. 

But then Jace had stepped into Alec’s freezing anger-zone and his heightened body temperature had dropped low enough to make him pass out. So Isabelle had worked Alec through his problem and by the time Jace had woken up, Magnus and Alec’s hands were back together like glue was binding them. 

There’s challenges. They’re two months in and sometimes Jace can’t sleep at night because he thinks of all the things his fire could do, has done when Jocelyn was in his position, and yet all the things it hasn’t done. All the buildings he hasn’t run into because he’s been taking math quizzes. 

This is the only time Jace truly feels useful. When the flames are threatening everybody except for him and Clary and he knows that this is exactly where he’s supposed to be.

“The firemen say there’s people still trapped on the seventh and tenth level.” Simon’s voice says in their ears as they bound up the cement stairway. “I’m going to work on the base until you give me the signal.”

“Make it rain, Lewis.” Jace says and he laughs at the immediate sigh in his ear. 

“That joke doesn’t work anymore. Your opportunity was ten minutes ago and you missed it.” Simon groans. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

The flames are growing closer the farther up they run, but it doesn’t feel like it would for any normal person. For Clary and Jace, the intensity of fire feels less like a growing warmth and more like a comforting presence. Like the natural warmth created in his own bed after enough time beneath his covers. 

“I’ll take this floor.” Jace pants as they arrive at the seventh floor entry. He squeezes Clary’s shoulder. “You good?”

“All good. Be safe.”

He breaks the door down with his shoulder. Luke always tells him not to break doors down with his shoulder, because then he has a big ugly bruise and people at school look at him during track and ask why the fuck he has bruises on his shoulder like, is he breaking down doors? But fuck it, Jace always thinks when faced with a door, if he’s going to be a superhero then he’s going to do it the fun way. 

“Ow.” He mutters as the door collapses under him. There’s fire crawling down the hallway, the space a smokey catwalk that forces Jace to focus on his hearing instead of sight. He runs the length of the halls, straining to hear for signs of life until it’s finally apparent on his left. 

Apartment 713. He breaks the door down with his shoulder, which is finally necessary, and he’s met with the faces of a terrified family of three. 

There’s a mother, a teenage daughter no older than him, and a little boy. They’ve seemingly resigned themselves to sitting in the living room, enveloped both by the smoke and each other’s arms. As Jace hurries towards them, they look up at him as if he’s not entirely real. Even in a state of disbelief, the two women push the younger boy forward. 

“Him.” The mother insists, and Jace nods his understanding. 

“I’m going to get everyone out of here, alright? Stay calm.” He unslings his backpack and pulls out the fire blanket that he was using to keep him warm during physics just this morning. He wraps the little boy up, keeping him still despite his struggles to reach his mother and sister. “Hey, bud, it’s okay. We’re all going to go together. I just need you to stay in this blanket, okay? Don’t touch my skin, alright?”

He gets a muffled noise of affirmation from the kid and looks up at the mom and sister. “Stay close behind me. If there’s any fire near you just yell for me, okay?”

They nod. They’re oddly quiet. They don’t ask a million questions like scared civilians usually do, but Jace isn’t complaining. They don’t have time for that anyway. He adjusts his grip on the kid and leads them out, keeping a brisk pace but staying slow enough for them to follow safely behind him. There’s the obligatory pause as they stare down the hall in disbelief until Jace makes a noise in his throat that reminds them that the building is burning. 

He feels better as they pass every floor marker on the stairs, keeping a rhythmic chant in his head that motivates him to just keep running, keep running, keep running. 

He doesn’t pass Clary anywhere and that interrupts the chant for a minute, but then he reminds himself that different tasks take different times and Luke’s voice reminds him to focus on the bodies beside him, not far away from him. The kid whines. Jace runs faster. 

The ground floor is a welcome sight. He spills out the first door he finds that’s not barred by smoke and checks once more to see that the two women are still with him. They’re coughing, their faces caked with soot as they suck in raspy breaths. But they’re alive. 

Jace carefully transfers the kid to his mother. She clings to him, her hand supporting his head and her fingers combing through his dark hair. The rain is falling relentlessly, thanks to Simon, and the scene looks like something out of the end of a disaster movie. With a final sigh of relief, Jace signals for the nearby paramedics. 

And then the mother screams. Jace turns and runs, not processing what he’s running towards for a few seconds, just running toward the building because obviously it isn’t over. Then he sees her.

The daughter is running back inside. Jace doesn’t know her name, just shouts something unintelligible. This is one of those moments that Luke and Jocelyn warned him about. In these moments, they’d said, Jace could only rely on his instincts. And he’d hopefully be able to look back tomorrow and say his instincts were right. 

She stops and looks back at him, seemingly confused. Her hand is pressed flat against the door, ready to push it open and step inside and undo Jace’s work. 

“Hey,” he says in a shaking voice, “listen to me. Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. Okay? Whatever you’re going back for, it isn’t more important than your life. And I--I can go get it for you.”

She stares. Her eyes look unnaturally bright against her soot-dusted face and Jace realizes all at once that she has no idea what he’s saying. She doesn’t speak English. 

He shakes his head. He tries his best to signal to her that this isn’t safe, isn’t remotely a good idea, but she only inches toward the door. Jace glances helplessly over his shoulder at the mother, who’s now being restrained by a paramedic. Jace realizes that this is now a situation. There are paramedics and cops and firefighters circling around them, and they’re clearly keeping their distance for a reason. 

“Jace?” Clary’s voice in his ear interrupts the swirl of panic consuming him. “I’m seeing a whole cluster of people, please tell me you aren’t in the middle of that.”

“The girl--” Jace’s voice cracks and he tries again, “there’s a teenage girl and she’s trying to go back inside. Everyone is keeping their distance, I think the first floor might be ready to explode.”

“I’m coming--” Clary says immediately, but Simon’s voice cuts her off.

“Clary you can hardly walk. I’m closer, I’ll come.”

Jace doesn’t even have time to process all of this. He doesn’t know why Clary can hardly walk, but he can find out after he’s out of a possible blast zone. The girl is looking wildly around her, chest heaving, and she speaks. 

_“Fácil.”_ She says. Jace doesn’t know Spanish, but he knows one year of French. He knows the word, or at least he thinks he does, and he immediately takes several steps forward and shakes his head rapidly. 

“It’s not easy.” He insists. “It’s not. It--It was for me, because I can touch the fire. That’s my power, it’s fire. It was easy coming down because we were quick and I could have protected you if something fell or if we got cornered but if you go alone--”

“Jace.” Simon’s voice is coming from two places. It’s in his ear and on his left, where Simon is cautiously approaching. The proximity to the smoke is already making him cough and Jace knows that Simon is too vulnerable to fire to be standing this close. But he speaks Spanish. “She can’t understand you.”

“Tell her that she can’t go in now.” Jace urges. “Tell her it’s about to explode.”

The rain is weakening. The amount of ash falling from the sky outnumbers the water and Simon coughs hard into his hand, grimacing as ash forces itself into his lungs. He turns to the girl and begins, _“Señora--”_

She runs. Jace shouts in frustration as both he and Simon surge forward, following the girl past the door and into the bottom of the stairway. The smell of gas immediately makes itself known. One look at the flames climbing down the stairs is enough for Jace’s precious instincts to take over. 

He grabs the girl’s wrist. She screams. The gas ignites. 

Some things blur for a moment. In movies, when there’s an explosion, the action hero is supposed to hear a high pitched and continuous beep. But that’s not what Jace hears. He hears the girl screaming. Over and over, lengthened into infinity. It’s deafening. 

When it stops it doesn’t just cut off. It fades slowly as Jace takes a look around him. The girl is with her mother, sobbing into her arms as paramedics swarm around them. There’s a hand-sized burn on her wrist. 

Simon is on his knees. Clary is at his side, her hand firmly on his upper back as he hacks into his shaking hands. The rain has stopped. 

The only thing missing is the fire from the explosion. Jace is perplexed. The door that the girl had just been clinging to is blackened, as is that entire portion of the building, but the fire has ceased. 

“Jace.” Clary tugs at his arm and he flinches. “Hey, it’s just me. Come on, we need to go.”

“Where’s the fire?” Jace asks. Clary stares, her eyes searching his face. 

“What?” She shakes her head. “Jace, you put it out. I--I don’t know how you did that, I didn’t know we could do that. But you just kind of--” She makes a sweeping gesture with her arms, trying in futility to describe whatever he’d done. 

“You saved everyone.” Simon croaks from his spot on the ground. His face is streaked with black and the skin beneath the soot looks unhealthily pale. “Can we go?”

They set off in the direction of the car, Jace supporting Simon on his left and Clary on his right. He looks down at her ankle, where she’s rolled her legging up to reveal swollen skin. 

“What did you do to your ankle?” He asks.

“I jumped out of the second floor window.” She answers. 

Luke and Jocelyn have a lot to say. First, though, they’re smothered in hugs by the entire team. Clary gets ice on her ankle, courtesy of Alec. Simon gets a constant blast of cool air to lower his temperature, courtesy of Magnus. And Jace gets a lecture, courtesy of everyone. 

After the tiring process of promising everyone that he’s okay and that he’ll be more careful next time, Jace goes to the back porch. 

Luke has a beautiful backyard. A lot of people think that New York is shrouded in industry and skyscrapers, like there’s no room for any nature. Luke’s backyard is proof of the opposite. 

It’s like eternal autumn. The trees are somehow always decorated with orange and yellow and crops are beginning to sprout from Maia’s garden. Jace stretches out in the padded lawn chair and looks up at the rising moon. He wishes there was music playing to drown out the sound of the scream in his head. 

It only takes twenty minutes for Luke to decide that Jace has had enough alone time. He takes a seat beside Jace, the chair creaking as he settles in for a famous Luke Garroway Talk. Jace sighs. 

“How’s Clary?” He murmurs. “Is her ankle broken?”

“Just sprained.” Luke says simply. His silence afterwards indicates that he wants Jace to lead this conversation. So he can see where Jace is at, mentally. Isabelle’s theory that Luke somehow found time in his busy life to get a psychology degree holds up. 

“And Simon?”

“Resting. It was a lot of exposure for him. He’s gonna need about a day to get his powers back.” Luke replies. Jace has enough information, so he decides to stay silent. Like a child. He refuses to speak first, not this time. 

That only lasts two minutes. Then the silence becomes too much because he knows Luke is waiting (and he knows Luke can wait for as long as he wants) so he clears his throat and tries to begin. 

“I burned someone.” Jace says. Silence. “I didn’t want to, obviously. She spoke Spanish and she couldn’t understand me. She thought that because we got down so easily, she could go back up and get something. And there was a gas leak and the place was seconds from exploding so I just panicked and I grabbed her. She screamed.”

“Simon and Clary told me that you contained the explosion.” Luke responds calmly. “That’s a breakthrough.”

“I guess.” Jace shrugs. Somehow the act, which he can’t even recall doing, doesn’t seem monumental. Someone still got hurt. Two people, if you count Simon being forced to expose himself to the opposite of his power. “Luke, she had a--she had a burn on her wrist. The exact shape of my hand.”

“You saved her.” Luke says. He finally shifts in his chair so Jace can see him, making the conversation no longer a side-by-side confessional. His eyes are full of knowledge and understanding. Because he _knows._ If this has happened to Jace in the first two months, Luke has probably a thousand screams in his brain from the accumulative twenty years. 

“Simon could’ve held her back.” Jace answers immediately. “And he wouldn’t have burned her.”

“But he didn’t.” Luke says softly. “That’s what happened. Jace, if everything was perfect all the time? If this job was always safe and happy for everyone involved? Then anyone on the street would’ve been given these powers. But you were chosen because you’re strong and you can handle it.”

“Chosen?” Jace scoffs. “Luke, I got these because we were being stupid two months ago and we went somewhere we shouldn’t have gone. Wrong place, wrong time.”

“Everything happens for a reason.” Luke answers swiftly.

“What’s the reason for me leaving a giant scar on some innocent girl?” Jace fires back, and Luke puts a hand over his knee before his anger can swell over his edges. 

“Whenever she looks at that scar,” Luke says steadily, “she’ll remember the day you saved her life. Because that scar is only a small fraction of what could’ve happened to her.”

Jace doesn’t have anything else to say. He needs to think about this, like he does with everything Luke says. He needs to wonder and question and apply it to everything he’s learned already. At least for now the scream has stopped.

The backdoor cracks open behind them and a block of light falls over the darkening deck. A gust of wind gently brushes Jace’s hair away from his eyes. 

“Are you eavesdropping, Magnus?” He asks. He immediately receives an affronted noise of protest. 

“I’m offended that you think I’d intrude on your bonding moment.” Magnus says. “But we’re watching Project Runway and we think one of the annoying twins you hate might be eliminated tonight. So get your ass inside.”

The door shuts. Luke stands up. The porch lights flicker off, Isabelle’s signal from inside that she’s tired of waiting for her favorite show to start.

“You’re gonna be okay, Jace.” Luke murmurs as he follows Jace inside. 

“How do you know?” 

He stands beside Luke and looks into the living room, where the team is piled on every couch. Even Simon, though he’s asleep with his head in Maia’s lap while she grows flowers from her fingertips and then places them carefully between his curls. Clary has her foot elevated on Isabelle’s lap as they play their ridiculous game of guessing which of the three lamps in the room Isabelle will turn off next. And they’re laughing. 

“Because you have them.”

**Author's Note:**

> so !!! this is gonna be a much longer series with an explained origin story and development for the whole group (it wont just focus on jace!!) so hopefully you guys enjoy this !!
> 
> if u wanna talk about the au or just talk in general my tumblr is @simonlewhiss


End file.
